Stevie Wonder
"Innervisions"
(Tamla, 1973)

By CINTRA WILSON "New York, just like I pictured it. Skyscrapers, and everythang." -- "Living for the City" If it's possible, at some point in the universe after death, to live out a few choice glorious moments of anyone's life, I want to be one of Stevie Wonder's female backup singers during his late '70s recording sessions. When Wonderland studios was in full swing as the holy hotbed of Stevie's hard brand of gospel-laced soul fusion, all the musicians and backup singers he worked with must have been wobbling and shakily embracing each other in the halls, in profound shock from being so close to GOD. This was the era in which Stevie expressed all of his militant social views and righteous morality, and exposed personal and social hypocrisy with the most compassionate understanding. Every time I listen to this album, it has some deep metaphorical resonance with the phase of life I'm in and what I'm dealing with, and I've been listening to this album religiously since I was SIX, having stolen it from my mother and hidden it in my room back then. Besides that, it's super groovy. Everytime I hear it, it literally makes me cry, rejoice, sing, and dance -- it has never lost any of its emotional flavor for me, despite countless listenings. My Holy Trinity of all records is the stuff Stevie was doing in the late 70's -- "Innervisions," "Talking Book" and "Fullfillingness' First Finale." But I'll just talk about "Innervisions." In "Higher Ground" ("So darn glad they let me try it again -- 'cause my last time on earth I lived a whole world of sin ... gonna keep on trying..."), Stevie sings of the effort and driving will required to live this worldly incarnation correctly and not screw up this life's opportunity for enlightenment -- an idea which he rolls back over again with "Jesus Children of America" ("Trancendental meditation....speaks of inner preservation"). Some might consider "Jesus Children" to be a zealot's rant about the importance of recognizing the truth of one's self, but it has always struck me as manifesting the kind of visceral Courage of the Oppressed that must have been felt by an armed lineup of Black Panthers at the height of their powers. His simple, classic love song, "All is Fair in Love," reflects Stevie's vast personal knowledge of the torturous effects of romantic love on the human psyche, raw and open as an oyster, with a big black pearl inside -- brutally, beautifully honest. This song is brilliantly followed by his Latin beat-driven "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing," which is just the happiest, most ironic song in the world and imparts a sense of some invisible, benevolent spirit looking out for You, the dear listener struggling through life's maddening lameness. Anyone who's lost anybody or any part of themselves to drugs will identify with "Too High," which captures the ominous whimsy of speedballing through the high life, and the anguish that comes when you hurtle into willful, freefalling self-destruction in the sad pursuit of wrongful pleasures. Yet it does all this on the sly, without being preachy. When Spike Lee used "Living For the City" as the soundtrack of his crack manifesto in "Jungle Fever," he knew what he was doing -- there is no more powerful audio representation of the cruel eddies of inner-city fate. Some think The Beatles were the masters of bizarre other-worldly ends of songs, like that surreal tag at the end of "A Day in the Life" -- but the theatrical middle and completely incongruous end of "Living for the City" is as Capital O "Out" as anything Picasso ever origamied with his eyes. When side two wraps up with the love song "Golden Lady," the song doesn't end, it just keeps moving up a key, and moving up another key, then fading out higher and higher into the sky like a balloon sailing out of view, which somehow bumps the whole album up onto some top shelf of the sublime in your head. Stevie reprimands us, tells us how to do it right, then kisses us goodbye with this album, which is the nicest thing I could say about any piece of art. Go buy all his early stuff. Forget his newer stuff though, it all sucks.

Download a clip (1.6MB) of "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing"
from "Innervisions"

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